kyle,
My only word of warning is that when the spec is not clear on some subject, the members of the IRC channel are not always more clear.

I would like to point out, that these very questions are what help bring the perl 6 specification closer to Christmas. While you may not personally benefit immediately from the mind twisting discussion that follows, the net result to everyone in the end is benificial. If the spec isn't clear or hasn't been thought through it may not be obvious to the folks that are eating this stuff for breakfast (forest for the trees).

Here are two more ways you can contribute to perl 6.

First, write perl 6 code. Every time valid perl 6 code is written that doesn't work because of unimplemented features or because of bugs, a Rakudo (and presumably other implementations) ticket can be written. Rakudo hackers like to fix bugs and implement features that make users like you happy and their programs run. Seriously.

Second, help write perl 6. Wait a minute, isn't that what you said first? Not exactly. Rakudo is the perl 6 implementation on Parrot. Like any self-respecting language that will hopefully bootstrap itself, it wants to write as much of itself in itself as it can. Rakudo has gotten to the point where you don't really need to know how to code for Parrot in order to hack on Rakudo. There are still places where writing in PIR (parrot not perl 6) is helpful but you can pick what you want to work on. If there is some feature not yet implemented (built-in functions would probably be easiest) that you want to see - go ahead and write it (pmichaud is always looking for help). See steps to create a patch and http://rakudo.org/ for more details.